Digital Media and Race

Origins and Intellectual Foundations

The Internet as a technical and technological formation marked the principal concern for race and Internet scholars’ intellectual forebears. This research was technical in the sense that it paid attention to the technical systems that produced the network of connections that defines the Internet (e.g., cabling, code, software, computer hardware), as well as individuals’ unequal access to these digital objects, and technological in the sense that it was also concerned with how this technical infrastructure produced a new medium for social interaction. Scholars first writing about the intersection of race and the Internet were heavily influenced by the work of scholars such as Susan Herring, Sherry Turkel, Mark Poster, and Howard Rhinegold that focused on Internet users’ definition of the self, individual identity formation, and practices of social interaction, as well as the topic [Page 381]of citizenship and political engagement. These scholars’ work, however, was generally agnostic about the subject of race.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, however, a new generation of scholars provided a critical intervention that laid the foundation for future scholarship on digital media and race. They connected the Internet as a technical and technological formation to an already existing racial formation in which racial identity—and the power to construct such identities—was centrally important.

During this time period, Lisa Nakamura’s Race In/For Cyberspace, Lori Kendall’s Meaning and Identity in Cyberspace, and Byron Burkhalter’s Reading Race Online defined early understanding of and theorizing about the relationship between digital media and race. Approaching their studies from different methodological perspectives, from critical and cultural analysis to content and discourse analysis to ethnography, these scholars’ chief concern was the body’s role in mediating racial identity and power relations.

Nakamura and Kendall both studied Multiuser Dungeon/Domains (MUDs). The former observed users who engaged the Internet as an alternative space for racial fantasy, and identity play; the latter observed users who viewed their online personas as tethered to and expectedly consistent with users’ stated racial identities as an extension of themselves as citizens, despite their mediated connection to other users. Burkhalter studied popular discussion forums known as Usenet Newsgroups and argued that the fantasy–reality distinction belied the way that racial identity is always contingent, irrespective of “where” it is invoked or how it is mediated. He claimed that the dialogical text users coproduced online—not the body—significantly signified individuals’ racial identities, identities that clearly mediated users’ everyday lives.

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